


as if in a station when the trains sleep elsewhere

by Shermanic



Category: Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: F/M, Hiatus, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-03
Updated: 2011-07-03
Packaged: 2017-10-21 00:19:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/218722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shermanic/pseuds/Shermanic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Have you been in London long,” I asked, “or did you return only so that you might silently follow me home after attending my wife’s funeral without an invitation?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	as if in a station when the trains sleep elsewhere

I had noticed the strange, ill-defined figure at the back of the crowd since the beginning of the funeral. It was a cold, wet day, raining in a manner that seemed, to my literary mind, almost too appropriate. Perhaps the man was so noticeable to me because of the incongruity of his presence; apart from his own shadowy coat and top-hat, attendance was divided into friends of Mary’s, fellow medical practitioners, and acquaintances dating from my involvement with Holmes and Scotland Yard. I heartily liked Inspector Gregson, and Geoffrey Lestrade I had come to consider a friend, but something in the sight of their sympathetic faces and shabby detective’s finery made the bile rise in my throat. Fortunately mourning gives allowance to behavior that might otherwise be termed unforgivably rude, and I was able to make my departure quickly and tersely, shaking only a few pitying hands along the way.

I made it half a block, in the mist and the rain, before I confronted the shadowy figure in the top hat who had peeled away from the crowd and begun to trace my footsteps. Ordinarily I might have kept up the charade for longer, but I was tired and in no mood to play games. I tucked myself underneath a bookshop’s awning, which was solace from the rain if nothing else, and stepped out again when he was on the edge of walking past.

“If you are following me,” I informed him, “you are doing a very poor job of it.”

The man’s eyes were almost entirely in shadow from his hat, but I could see his smile, and when he spoke I knew instantly that it was not a man at all. I had that voice only once before, when Holmes had dragged me to the opera one evening after discovering whose name was to be placed on the marquee. It was not the sort of voice that one forgets. “I was following you,” she admitted. “But I do appreciate your constructive criticism.”

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Paying my respects,” said Irene Norton, whom I had only known as Adler, and barely that. She offered me her arm. “You no longer require shelter, as the rain has stopped. Shall we?”

“If you wished to pay your respects you might have done so along with everyone else,” I said, not moving. “Besides which, you were not invited.”

“Exactly so. You will note that we are no longer at the funeral.”

I had thought that I was finished with such clever disagreements over minutiae years ago. “This is a poor time to engage a man in such a petty argument. If you please, Mrs. Norton—”

“Irene,” she said, “please.”

“It is of no importance to me what you care to be called, as I am leaving.”

“Dr. Watson,” she said, saying my name in that beautiful voice as if were some kind of talisman. She tilted back her hat and I saw, just for a moment, the face that Holmes had once said a man might die for. In the strange glow after rain it was still handsome but rather pale, bleeding away into shadow at the edges. Something about her reminded me of Mary; but, I reasoned, as of late nearly every woman had reminded me of Mary, as if her resemblance had diffused outward even as her body lay newly under the earth. “If you are indeed leaving,” she said, more gently, “it will be of no hardship to you if I follow, surely. I have only a few things I wish to say.”

I stepped out onto the street, ignoring her proffered arm. “Speak quickly.”

Disregarding my command, she followed alongside me like a shadow. With a pang I remembered what it was like to walk down a London street with a figure who matched you exactly, step for step, the both of you marching along to the sound of the other’s drumming. For a time we walked in silence, listening only the sound of cab wheels on cobblestones and the indistinct conversations around us that melded together and spread out like the sound of a waterfall.

Eventually I could no longer stomach it. “Have you been in London long,” I asked, “or did you return only so that you might silently follow me home after attending my wife’s funeral without an invitation?”

Even in the face of my efforts, she did not appear taken aback. “Neither,” she said. “That is to say, I was in London with my—I was in London, and when I heard of your wife—”

“I see.”

“I am sorry.”

“Thank you.”

Despite the awkwardness of the conversation, I gained some small, vicious pleasure in seeing her so obviously knocked off her bearings. Nevertheless she was still very elegant, in her man’s waistcoat and top hat, standing in the streets of London exactly as Holmes had, as if she had never left them. There was a solemnity and a stillness about her that was almost frightening, with each emotion passing over her face like a faint ripple through water, leaving it entirely smooth.

“I never knew her,” said Irene Adler, looking strangely wistful for a woman reciting such a brutally obvious platitude.

“Before today I had never met you, either,” I pointed out.

“But you knew me,” she said, “nevertheless, if only through telling the world of how you tossed a smoke rocket through my window.” She smiled faintly. “I read your stories, you know. She was never in them.”

I could not help myself. More than a hard day, it been a hard year, or rather a hard two years, and the damp that clung to my coat did nothing to dispel the sensation that I was wading through the River Styx at every turn. “God damn you,” I told her, in the grip of a sudden and transcendent anger. “Did you have any purpose in coming here except to mock me?”

She regarded me with an expression that was all the more sorrowful for its detachment, which bordered on the eerie. “I have indeed been told,” she said, “that I have far too much in common with Sherlock Holmes.”

“God damn you,” I said again, turning to walk in another direction. “God damn both of you.”

She grabbed my the sleeve of my coat. I whirled in shock; she was surprisingly strong, for a woman who appeared to be barely there. “Doctor,” she said, and I felt a savage satisfaction at seeing the real, wrenching emotion in her face. “I didn’t want—that is to say, I only came because I was sorry. I should have come earlier. I apologize.”

“I do not need to be pitied,” I said, twisting away.

“Doctor,” she said. “Please. It was a cruel thing of him to do, to have left you like that.”

A shudder ran through me. I had thought of it as leaving before, but to hear it spoken aloud, and from such a strangely reliable source, made it somehow real, and therefore obscene. “He did not leave,” I informed her. “He died.”

“No,” she said. “Your wife—I am sorry to say it again, or to quarrel once more over vocabulary, but your wife died. He left.”

I gave her a sarcastic look, one I had perfected on Holmes. I was not in a mood to be charitable, or less than cruel.

“Take it from one who has experienced both ends of the story, Doctor,” said Irene Adler. “He had a choice.”

I ran a hand over my face. It seemed a cruel irony that, Mary and Holmes both having faded away, I was left instead with this woman who, despite her literary connections, bore no relationship to either of them but in the austere cast of her face and the quietness running under her that I could not reach. In that moment I would have given anything to have Holmes back with me again, if only to knock him down.

“Take it from the writer,” I said bitterly. “Of course he left. Why else would I write, if not to try to hold on?”

“Yes,” she said, “yes. I had wondered.”

If she had been Holmes I would have seen some joy or expression of victory flash across her face, but in her shadowed eyes there was nothing at all. “Your stories, your writing. ‘The late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory,’” she said. She wore an absent expression when quoting, which I recognized wrenchingly as the same that my friend had often donned. “Well done. I liked that. You turn a neat phrase, Doctor.”

“Did my description inconvenience you?”

“Inconvenience? Hardly. I have found,” she told me, “that your accounts have only added to my bizarrely formidable reputation.”

“Holmes complained incessantly about them.”

“But Mary never did?”

Perhaps it was the gloom of the weather, or the hour, or the shock of Irene Adler’s sudden reappearance, or the fact that I had just sat through the second funeral of a friend and lover within two years, but I became aware that I was very, very tired. “Why are you here?” I said, in a voice barely above a whisper. “He is gone. You were his opponent. What business can you have with me?”

“Life goes on,” she said quietly, “even without heroes.”

“No,” I said, “it doesn’t.” Though she had been Holmes’ double and Holmes’ foil it seemed incredible to me that she could not understand my point, this woman who stood half in shadow and seemed to have no center to her. Unlike Lestrade and Gregson, who were reminders of the things I had done at Holmes’ side, always with Holmes, she had a life outside of the two of us; she had kept some mysteries. Surely she could understand that we were not all so lucky, or so brave.

“I don’t exist without him,” I said to her. “Oh, yes, I want to hold onto him, but why else do you think I write? As the loyal friend I am nothing without a hero. Speak to your husband, if you can’t understand.” She was watching me impassively. I felt a sudden kinship with the man she had married, though I knew nothing of him; no doubt he was a very ordinary fellow, who loved her deeply and understood her not at all. “He might know.”

“Godfrey?” she said. Her face softened. “Yes, I suppose.”

By that time we had walked quite a ways, and had reached the point where I would usually have turned right to continue on to Baker Street; I docketed this fact without even noticing that I was doing so. Every time I came this way the same thing had happened, I realized bitterly. It bordered on the absurd.

And why was she here after all, this strange woman in the top hat and man’s coat and the shadow over her eyes? The piece of her that belonged here was a part of Holmes’ life, not mine, just as Lestrade and Gregson were. I wrote stories about the man constantly and still he could not resist the temptation to infuse himself into every aspect of every day, even in death; it was the day of Mary’s funeral and here I was alongside a woman I would always think of as the woman, thanks to him, pitying myself over my role in his life or lack of it. I had no stories without him in them anymore. Even Mary had been subsumed. Holmes had been nearly everything to me; whether she had known this upon my proposal or realized it only after we married and he continued to appear in my consulting-rooms, I do not know, for I had never meant to be cruel to her. She had had a life of her own, and friends of her own, but when it came to me and my stories she had merely eked out a life in the spaces he left behind, surviving on marginalia.

Something in my face must have crumpled, or perhaps she was merely as skilled at reading me as I had always found Mary to be, and as Holmes had been too, when he bothered, but Irene reached out and touched my arm. It was too gentle to have been steadying. “And yet,” she said, “you won’t write this.”

“What?” I said. Perhaps I would have understood her if I had been thinking more clearly, but I was still tired and choked with bitterness. “Of course I won’t. It isn’t about Holmes. Who under the sun would care to read it?”

“Quite so,” said Irene, adjusting her hat. “But here it is, occurring.”

I said nothing. We had ended any pretense of moving forwards, and the city crowd washed over and around us.

Irene said, “And we will both remember that it happened.”

“That didn’t save Mary,” I told her, childishly.

“No,” she said. She shrugged, in a curiously inelegant gesture, and tilted back her hat as if in capitulation. Her eyes were very pale. “Godfrey and I wanted to have children too, you know. That’s something you won’t find in your account of my little scandal. Irene Adler, the well-known adventuress. It would have been a girl.”

“I am sorry.”

“Thank you.”

We stood there quietly, at the crossroads of the two lives I had once had. All I had to do to be rid of this strange, shadowy woman and all she had unearthed, I thought, would be to take a step, any step, in any direction, but I found I could not do so. The moment stretched outwards, the two of us caught between the seconds, world without end.

“Tell me,” I said. “What is it like, to be the one doing the leaving?”

I might have meant to hurt her, or rather Holmes, but even now I could not manage it, and my words came out hollow and plaintive instead. She waited a moment before answering.

“Easier,” she said, “in the beginning.”

The rain had begun to fall again, lightly. Her hand, still in its leather glove, ghosted over my cheek; she reached out, kissed me on the forehead, and then faded away into the crowd, leaving me alone in the shell of this too-familiar street with every cobblestone shining in the rain like a tarnished mirror, my damp coat, my empty house.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is taken from a translation of Pablo Neruda's poem "No estés lejos de mi un solo día" ("Don't go far off," or "Don't stay far from me"). I also couldn't help but base my description of Irene on Romaine Brooks' 1923 self-portrait—it seemed fitting.


End file.
